New York City summer, summer everywhere, mountains of my past;
picking through the personals for a new girlfriend and finding sixteen women looking
for companionship, someone to care about;
basketball with brother of one of my ex-wives;
how it is, as the years pass, birds and motorized vehicles among the constants.
This joy, this sadness, of staying late until eight o'clock at work on Friday night
and then bottle of beer while walking up Ninth Avenue, sunset reflected off midtown
towers, girl-watching female heroin addicts,
Latino women with cigarette burns on their arms and still I desire their herpes, I do
not think about the women I loved;
home with nothing to do but read Raymond Chandler or watch Humphrey Bogart, go
to sleep.
This is life and not life. In thirty years or so I'll be gone from the earth, bones
whitening on some mountain
or rotting in the lowlands earth, wet, river or estuary I lived near, flesh to sweat flesh
with the population,
dead. This death consciousness of which should give this life's activities perspective,
except for the red sunset which remains untouched by atomic IQ;
and dead, laying open to the blue sky and dry leaves one autumn like last autumn, or
the autumn I realized my insignificance.
Copyright 2001 & 2007 by Robert Ronnow.